A Report On Translation Of Chinese Four-character Phrases

From the translation practice of the first chapter of the monograph A Study of Translation and Communication of Lu Xun’s Poems by Professor Wu Jun, the writer of this report found that, a number of newly emerged idiom-like four-character phrases in Chinese are also important information carriers. The reason for this phenomena is that, on one hand, current idioms can’t meet people’s increasing needs of expressions, on the other hand, people want to achieve an aesthetic effect with tidy-structured and rhythmical four-character phrases, so a large amount of new four-character phrases come into being. These newly emerged modern phrases have their forms similar to that of the old idioms yet flexible in semantic expressions without so much implied meanings like the classical Chinese idiomatic phrases. These emerging new four-character phrases mainly belong to coordinate word groups, subject-predicate word groups, verb-object word groups and word groups consisting of modifiers etc. Such as in the book A Study of Translation and Communication of Lu Xun’s Poems, there are many different four-character phrases which are worthwhile for the study. So the writer of this report chooses this book as the sample for case analysis of the translation report and makes a study on four different word-group phrases.Based on the translation practice of chapter one from A Study of Translation and Communication of Lu Xun’s Poems by Professor Wu Jun, and under the light of Eugene A. Nida’s functional equivalence theory, this report mainly deals with the analysis of grammatical structures of four-character phrases, which can help increase the efficiency of translation. With an explicit description about the background, process and case analysis of the task, the report summarizes some approaches that the writer of this report uses in the translation practice of four-character phrases. At last, the report analyzes the development trends of four-character phrases in Chinese language. In conclusion, through analyzing the grammatical structure of words in a four-character phrase, the translation quality and speed can be increased efficiently. The result of the research will be beneficial for the further study of translation from Chinese into English and vice versa.